Month: July 2017

Summertime in Georgia at Mustache World HeadquartersIs high time for mowin’‘Cause the grass sure likes growin’The field ain’t level nor flat and it’s peppered with holesAnd there’s always a threatOf thunder and wetTall trees tower over the edges of the open spaceSo when morning or evening shadows fallIt can seem like I’m hitting a wallYou’d think with so much rain I’d never have to worry about dustBut with every turn it’ll riseCovering my hat, whiskers and eyes

Well, so between all the dust and the shadows and sun I woveUp and down and across the field I droveTurning a wild weed pasture into something closer to a golf course fairwayI’d turn my head when I had to go through the red clay haboobAnd slow down a touch when over toward the trees I movedThere’s no regular grid on this patch, I go here, there and thataway

If you’ve never mowed grassHere in Georgia, take a passIf you’re squeamish about wildlife surprisesYou need to let your senses do‘Cause there’s a lot to pay attention toBut none are as important as your eyes isMore than once these last few yearsI’ve often had to swerve and veerAs summer’s cycle goes through its flow and ebbBut when you’re shade and dust cloud blindIt’s hard not to accidentally findYour face plastered with a giant spider web

It could have been a mighty crashI could only use one hand to thrashAnd fend off the critter with my spittin’, slappin’ and blowin’It just goes to prove with real aplombHow true is that ol’ rule of thumbKeep your mind on what you’re doin’, and look where you’re goin’

Some parts of this narrative may be fiction. Sort of.Memo to Self: Next time work out a rhyming scheme before you start writing the poem.

Climate alarmists could get some respect if they could bring themselves to admit once in a while that they’re not as sure of the “settled” science as they used to claim to be, that the data don’t necessarily all point the way they used to claim it would, and that they still have a lot to learn about how the climate works.

Actual climate scientists do include these caveats in their pronouncements, but the media can’t bring themselves to emphasize them anywhere near as boldly as they do the claims of Al Gore, Hockey Stick Mann, and the rest of the “March the Infidels to the Prison Camps” alarmist cult.

NASA has been “tweaking” the data so consistently that the truple-digit summer heat waves of my youth in Sacramento have surely been retconned into subzero blizzards by now, so that the trend line can still point toward future actual subzero blizzards being forecast as triple-digit winter heat waves and still support the CAGW Newthink.

Here’s the thing: climate changes. It is a natural process, and nothing in nature is static. While the cult wants everyone to believe that man is responsible for catastrophic changes that nature can’t possibly recover from, the truth is that the geological record has been known for over a century to demonstrate a tremendous range of natural variation. Our planet has seen subtropical conditions in the subarctic, and has at other times been a virtual snowball, with no significant liquid water to be found anywhere.

If the prescriptions of the cult could actually be implemented, and if they could actually affect the climate (the former is unlikely and the latter is impossible), they could be every bit as negatively disruptive as they claim modern industrialization has been.

One of the fundamental tenets of the faith has been rising sea levels. (The site in the link has had its server melted down due to a Drudge link. I found this quote at Gateway Pundit.)

NASA satellite sea level observations for the past 24 years show that – on average – sea levels have been rising 3.4 millimeters per year. That’s 0.134 inches, about the thickness of a dime and a nickel stacked together, per year.

As I said, that’s the average. But when you focus in on 2016 and 2017, you get a different picture.

Sea levels fell in 2016, and with all of this winter’s record-breaking snowfall, I wouldn’t be surprised if they decline again this year.

This is actually not the first sea-level decline observed in recent years. From merely searching “sea level falling” on Google, I found the following cultsplaining of similar findings from 2013 and 2015, respectively. The first is a real howler.

The one-and-a-half-year, 7-mm fall in sea levels was certainly a curveball. At the time, global warming skeptics used it to support arguments against climate change.

Fasullo, who was trying to balance out the Earth’s “water budget,” sought an explanation for where that water, normally ocean bound, might have ended up.

Now he believes he has one….

In most cases, though, water that falls on land eventually drains into the ocean. Even if a whole lot of rain fell in South America’s Amazon, for example, it could slow sea-level rise for only about a couple of months, as it slowly made its way to the sea.

So in order to make sea levels fall, the water had to be stored in a place where it didn’t reach the ocean for a long while. That place, it turns out, was Australia.

Yes. Tiny Australia has enough water storage capacity to cause the oceans to drop by a measurable amount, according to a member of the Most Holy Church of How Your Cushy Modern Standard of Living Is Destroying Everything.

The later cultsplanations at least have the advantage of trying to blame an actual geological process, but in 2015 they seem to have misplaced the decimal point on the timescale.

Rocks seem so very solid from our puny human perspective. Things are rock hard, rock solid, and are reliable as the rock itself. But from a geological perspective, rock is an elastic sheet that encompasses our planet in a thin, flexible membrane that responds to every disturbance.

Nowhere is this more evident than with isostatic rebound, a process of geological buoyancy by which the earth’s crust, having sunk beneath the weight of glaciers from a preceding ice age, bounces up as ice sheets melt and the water runs back into the sea. While this melting ice is filling the oceans, the land can rebound so quickly that it rises even faster than the climbing sea level. The result is an apparent paradox: where continental glaciers are melting and exposing the land, the local sea levels are dropping.

The last major glaciation on North America, during which the continent was compressed under billions of tons of ice, ended some 11,000 years ago, but parts of the Great Lakes region, for example, are still rebounding. This is what could be contributing to sea-level decline in the present day, not the melting of the scattered few puny glaciers climate alarmists are whining about.

Here’s another shocking discovery about global climate change: It contributes to the falling of sea levels, and not to the rising of the seas as previously thought…

“What we didn’t realise until now is that over the past decade, changes in the global water cycle more than offset the losses that occurred from groundwater pumping, causing the land to act like a sponge – at least temporarily,” the lead researcher added.

He further explained that these new findings from this study, which is set to be published on Friday in the journal Science, give scientists an idea of the connection among climate change, sea levels and water shortage.

This actually comes close to admitting that the “settled” science isn’t settled, but the greater doctrine — that Human-Caused Climate Change is Coming to Kill Us All — still needs to be advanced.

The coming plummet in sunspot activity that the world’s actual space scientists have been forecasting, could result in Sacramento actually having subzero blizzards in July, but the cult would blame it somehow on mankind. They might even find a way to say it’s a consequence of global warming, as they have been wont to do for three decades and change.

When any other set of false prophets keeps predicting the end of the world and getting it wrong, eventually, cosmopolitan and hick alike, we all laugh them off the stage. We hicks are still waiting for the cosmopolitans to catch on to a scam we never bought into in the first place.

Unlike Jethro Gibbs, I do believe in coincidence. I also believe that not everything that looks like a coincidence is a coincidence. I suppose I adhere more closely to the Goldfinger Rule of Thumb.

Still, if the little hairs on the back of your neck are standing up, it’s prudent to be (at least mentally) prepared for the next step in the Goldfinger progression. Which kinda resembles Gibbs’ Rule #36.

In algebra — and probably in other flavors of occult mathematics — r is the variable used to represent all numbers.

All numbers. Positive and negative. Odd and even. Rational and irrational. Real and imaginary. Prime and non-prime. It is an infinite set.

It’s not the only infinite set. The set of only all positive numbers is entirely contained in r, as is the set of only all negative numbers, and the set of only all even numbers, and so on. r is not only the set of all numbers, it is the set of all sets. It contains every numeric value in the known universe and all the unknown universes.

Does it contain literally everything? No. It does not contain that creepy uncle who’s always telling you to pull his finger. It contains every number that can possibly be used to describe him, such as the one defining all the ways he grosses you out — but it doesn’t include the actual ways.

Nancy Pelosi was Shrieker of the House. Nobody had any clue what Obamacare was going to look like. The first George W. Bush “Miss me yet?” billboard had yet to appear. Karl Urban was still “that guy in Lord of the Rings — Elmer or something like that.” Or worse, “that Kiwi country singer who’s married to Nicole Kidman.”